Although it is standard belief that a doctor will notify a patient if there is a problem with a medical test or some kind of irregularity, a recent study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine shows patients are not always told of abnormal test results.

When a family member did not receive notification of abnormal test results, Dr. Lawrence P. Casalino, of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, led a research effort to discover the prevalence of this pattern, according to Reuters Health. With his colleagues, Casalino analyzed records from 5,434 patients, chosen at random, from 19 community and four academic medical practices. The patients ranged in age from 50 to 69 years old. In total, 1,889 abnormal test results were found, and about 7 percent of the time (or 135 tests), the patient was not told of abnormal results.

Casalino and his research team looked at 14 tests, such as cholesterol and potassium levels, the Reuters article said. There were patterns in the consistency of errors; for example, three of the practices analyzed had no errors, while at two of them, failure to report abnormal test results happened more than 20 percent of the time. Casalino and his colleagues also noted that practices using both computer-based and paper records had the greatest frequency of error. According to the Reuters story, he suggested that all patients follow up with their doctors within two weeks of a medical test.

The New York Times published an article about this study in its health section online. Tara Parker-Pope, a Times reporter and writer of the Well blog (one of my favorites), included her own summary of the study.

In this post, she noted a similar study done in 2007 by the journal Quality & Safety in Health Care, which showed about one in 30 office visits resulted in some kind of testing mistake. Getting test results back from the lab created 25 percent of the errors; in about 7 percent of the errors, patients were not told of the results at all, Parker-Pope said.